Tag Archives: tianjin

Yesterday I had the pleasure of returning to Tianjin to attend a wedding.

The wedding was great, and included everything you wouldn’t expect, from a caravan of red cars to the Imperial March.

Red is a lucky color in China, so it was definitely a “red letter day.” The families had contracted with a service to drive us from Beijing to Tianjin (about a 90 minute jaunt) in a line of red cars.

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The drivers were a ton of fun — to kill time they cooperated to repeatedly cut-off a car which had cut us off

Turned out to be a cop!

And using the CB radios to communicate in…. unorthodox ways

Not his radio

The ceremony itself was quite nice, and one of the fellow guests mentioned that Chinese weddings are increasingly emphasized by their western counterpart. The exclusive use of American music (with Celine Dion at a particularly important part) was notable, though I’ve never heard the Star Wars Imperial March used as a wedding march before.

All hail Palpatine!

All hail Celine!

The wedding reception was held in the same building as the couple’s new apartment, which they proudly showed off. This was the highlight of the day: their freakin’ sweet HDTV.

A great day! We were driven back to Xizhimen on a chartered bus

And then took a taxi back. The weather was beautiful, and the sky was clear.

The final segment of my Tianjin Sentiments (perhaps a fitting companion to another blogger’s “Balkan Memories“?) is of the pollution in Tianjin. Tianjin is composed of two characters — Tian meaning Heavenly or Sky, Jin meaning Ford. In a previous post I explained that I would translate Tian as “Heavenly” for beautiful things, and as “Sky” for more prosaic uses. Thus, this post on the pollution in Tianjin discusses contamination in Sky Ford.

The pollution in Skyford is everywhere. Our local guides explained that it was the result of the building boom that builds new offices, malls, and apartments everywhere. Certainly there was a lot of construction in Tianjin, as there was in Beijing.

Some of the power plants in Tianjin clearly gave off a blackish smoke

Moore cooling plants, these as scene from the train (metro)

At the Port of Tianjin I saw more trucks than I have ever seen, in my life.

Riding in a taxi in this is oddly relaxing: as you’ve already forfeited your life, there is nothing to do but wait.

A Chinese wears a mask (as I did) while gazing out at what was once the Pacific Ocean

To the smog-chocked horizon and beyond, industrial salt ponds grew on the reclaimed land. Plants did not.

Industrial machinery helps process the salt

Salt Town

The ocean was brown. The cause of that was, among other things…

… and oil refinery. The refinery is much, much closer than it looks. The deadly smog makes everything look hazy and far away, and this part of Tianjin had the worst smog of anywhere in China I’ve seen.

While the Ocean is dead, the port lives. The amount of shipping containers was Cyclopean, if not Lovecraftian

This is a hard post to right — in the physical sense. The pollution in Tianjin is worse than Beijing, and the combination of the air and the days have caught up to me. All day I have this ugly feeling of exhaustion without sleepiness.

There’s a lot to see in Tianjin during this sidetrip, so I decided to break up my Tianjin photolog into a mini series. As this series completes descriptions & such will be added to the section titles below.